Laurie D. Graham, "Calling It Back to Me: Poems" (Random House, 2026)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Laurie D. Graham, "Calling It Back to Me: Poems" (New Books Network, June 12, 2026)

Episode Overview

In this episode, host Holly Gattery interviews acclaimed poet Laurie D. Graham about her latest poetry collection, Calling It Back to Me (McClelland & Stewart, 2026). The conversation delves into the personal and historical landscapes explored in the book—a long poem that traces Graham’s great-grandmothers’ migration stories, the complexities of family silence, colonial histories, poetic form, and the ethics of storytelling. The episode offers intimate reflections on poetry’s power to hold multiple truths, the process of distillation in writing, and the enduring relevance of unsettling dominant narratives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Genesis of Calling It Back to Me

• Laurie started the project while assisting her aunt, who was sorting family heirlooms during the early pandemic, a process complicated by the aunt’s dementia.
• The familial artifacts and the gaps or holes in family stories inspired Graham to research her genealogy and reckon with the legacy of homesteading and colonization in Canada.
• Poetry, with its tolerance of gaps and ambiguities, became the ideal form for exploring these fragmented histories.
  • “It was from there that I was doing a little bit of genealogical research just to kind of learn for myself a bit more of the facts of our being here… the searching kind of extended into both sides of my family and started sort of thinking… about the damage that homesteading has done to this continent.” (Laurie D. Graham, 03:10–04:33)

2. Why Poetry? The Ethics & Aesthetics of the Form

• Graham describes poetry as the only form capable of adequately expressing and honoring the gaps in family knowledge and history.
• Visual aspects of her poem—short, spare lines and the implied space between them—echo the elliptical nature of memory and incomplete narratives.
• She acknowledges the “precariousness” of trying to record family history as prose, feeling more at ease beginning in the indeterminate space of poetry.
  • “[T]he right in the gaps seemed to be the place where I wanted to start.” (Laurie D. Graham, 05:33–07:12)

3. Poetry’s Capacity for Holding Multiple Truths

• Both host and guest discuss the responsibility and challenges of being the family storyteller: balancing respect for privacy with the need to speak truths that have traditionally been silenced.
• Poetry’s refusal to resolve or pin down definitive answers is highlighted as both liberating and necessary.
  • “Poetry allows multiple truths to exist side by side and not resolve necessarily. And that’s something that was kind of the main goal of this book.” (Laurie D. Graham, 09:59–11:00)

4. Intergenerational Silence and Its Discontents

• The duo reflects on communal silences around family history, particularly among women, and the costs of preserving those silences versus breaking them.
• Laurie expresses both guilt and duty in exposing stories her great-grandmother might have preferred remain private, recognizing both trauma and self-protection in silence.
• Noteworthy quote from the book:
  • “No doubt she’d not be happy with my saying so here or with my godlessness or even wanting to know the sum of what’s been lost from not talking and to what extent. That was her goal.” (Holly quoting Laurie, 18:37)
• Graham concludes that the act of speaking unsaid truths—especially about “the founding theft” of Indigenous land—has urgent ethical stakes, even when the stories remain partial.
  • "There are some larger urgencies around knowing, around pushing past that silence that definitely propel this book.” (Laurie D. Graham, 26:35)

5. The Importance of Unsettling Narratives

• Both speakers value literature that unsettles and disturbs comforting narratives, especially regarding settler histories and Canada’s colonial past.
• Graham sees discomfort as a necessary part of collective reckoning, not something for which writers owe their audiences relief or resolution.
  • “It’s not on anyone else to make us feel guilty.” (Holly Gattery, 28:29)
  • “I don’t understand why people don’t like to be unsettled. It’s such a good thing for us to be unsettled.” (Holly Gattery, 28:40)

6. Reading from Calling It Back to Me

• [29:39–32:58] Laurie reads several pages from the title poem, a passage that distills themes of lineage, loss, and longing through its rhythmic, fragmentary style.

7. The Process and Craft of Distillation in Poetry

• Graham walks through her process: moving from formless prose poems and handwritten notes to sharp, narrow lines—cutting away anything that feels like explanation or narrative completion.
• The distilled, enjambed lines foster ambiguity and resist tidy closure, reinforcing the thematic focus on absence, loss, and the unknown.
  • “The more that was there, the more I felt this assumption on the page that I knew what I was doing or that I knew what I was talking about or that the story can somehow reach a completion. And so…the lines started getting really, really short... and the process of cutting became really crucial in the revision stage of this book.” (Laurie D. Graham, 35:29–38:00)

8. The Invitation and Accessibility of Poetry

• Discussion on poetry’s undeserved reputation for difficulty—Graham insists that poetry needn’t be a riddle to solve.
• She encourages readers to approach poetry intuitively, to let it evoke feeling and memory, rather than chasing definitive “meanings.”
  • “I want to really assert a reading of poetry that doesn’t require you to always know what’s going on and to be okay with…just to, like, be able to exist in the book without feeling expectations…” (Laurie D. Graham, 40:17–41:47)

9. Graham’s Editorial Work and Future Projects

• As publisher of Brick, Graham foregrounds the magazine’s commitment to literary nonfiction, blending emerging and established voices, and its 50th anniversary celebrations.
• She’s working on a “companion” prose book that developed in tandem with the poems, as well as early-stage fiction.
• “I have written a book of prose, nonfictiony poetic-y type prose that has similar concerns as Calling It Back to Me… [F]orm-wise...it’s going long on the page where these poems are very, very slight. I’ve got, I’m sitting on fiction that I should almost not say anything about because it’s in that weird, precarious, nascent stage…” (Laurie D. Graham, 46:26–50:10)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Poetry and Ancestral Silence:
  • “I am totally outing her in a way that I bet you she wouldn’t appreciate…She wanted to make sure that the stories were not told, that the things that were private would remain private. And I am totally outing her in a way that I bet you she wouldn’t appreciate.” (Laurie D. Graham, 20:07–22:58)
• On Writing as a Process of Discovery:
  • “I don’t know if I got it right. It’s sort of a matter of I got it right in this moment. And I’m actually really curious already to know what I’m going to think of this book in…10 years, 20 years or something.” (Laurie D. Graham, 09:59–13:13)
• On Family History and Land:
  • “The subject of this book is around…the theft that founds this country, the theft of land and how that is in fact why I exist here. And then I don’t have much in the way of why my families came here and engaged in that theft. So there are some larger urgencies…that definitely propel this book too.” (Laurie D. Graham, 26:35)
• On What Poetry Requires of Its Readers:
  • “We gotta change how people read this stuff...I think it’s because so often poetry is taught as, like, a riddle. Like, you’re supposed to pour over it and solve for X. What does this thing mean? Give me the definitive answer.” (Laurie D. Graham, 40:17–41:47)

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Timestamps of Important Segments

• Laurie’s Genesis of the Book: 03:10–04:53
• Why Poetry, not Prose?: 05:33–07:39
• Responsibility & Multiple Truths in Poetry: 09:59–13:40
• Discussion of Previous Book, 'Settler Education': 14:14–17:28
• On Family Silences & Storytelling Ethics: 18:37–28:29
• Laurie Reads from 'Calling It Back to Me': 29:39–32:58
• On Distillation & Poetic Process: 35:29–38:33
• Why Poetry is Not a Riddle: 40:17–43:51
• Laurie Discusses Brick Magazine, Future Work: 46:26–50:31

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Tone and Language

Conversational, intimate, and reflective, the episode maintains a tone of intellectual curiosity and emotional honesty. Both Holly and Laurie bring warmth, humor, and a spirit of gentle challenge—inviting the listener into the pleasures and discomforts of both poetry and family history.

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Final Thoughts

This episode is a valuable listen for anyone interested in family histories, the ethics of literary representation, poetry’s forms, or the ongoing conversations around settler identity and colonial legacies in Canada. Laurie D. Graham’s Calling It Back to Me is positioned not only as a poignant personal work but as a poetic intervention into how histories—especially those marked by silence—are remembered, told, and shared.

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Transcript

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[Holly Gattery]

Hello everyone and welcome to nbn. I'm your host, Holly Gattery, and I'm excited to be joined today by one of my most beloved poets, Laurie D. Graham, to talk about her new long poem, Calling It Back to Me, which was released with McClellan and Stewart. And this is Laurie's most personal collection yet and Laurie is a two time Trillium Book Award finalist. In these searching, spare and resonant poems, Laurie traces the story of her great grandmother's lives before and after they left their homelands and settled on this continent. Striving to understand how she came to be here and writing the act of colonization as it exists in her own family history. Laurie grew up in Treaty 6 territory near Edmonton, Alberta, and has lived in Peterborough, which is the territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg since 2018, where she is a poet and editor and the publisher of Bric Magazine, a journal of literary nonfiction which is based in Toronto. Her first book, Rove, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for the Best First Book of Poetry in Canada. Her second and third books, Settler Education and Fast Commute were both nominated for Ontario's Trillium Book Award for poetry. Welcome to the show, Laurie.

[Laurie D. Graham]

Thank you so much, Holly, for having me.

[Holly Gattery]

It's such a pleasure. So I want to dive right in. And my first question for you is, where did this long poem start for you?

[Laurie D. Graham]

It started in my aunt's basement, more or less. My aunt had dementia and she was realizing in the first months of the pandemic, in fact, that she could not continue with her day to day life at home as it had been for all the years of her life. So she was starting to sort through the stuff of our family, the things that she inherited from her parents and grandparents, and she was passing those things along to me. And stories, as I was receiving them, had holes poked in them by this disease, or there was no story at all to accompany something that she understood at the time to be an important artifact of our existence on this continent. So it was from there that I was doing a little bit of genealogical research just to kind of learn for myself a bit more of the facts of our being here. I was talking to family members as well, just to at first corroborate what my aunt said. But then that searching kind of extended into both sides of my family and started sort of thinking, I guess, about the. The history of the legacy of homesteading that kind of founds my existence on this continent and the damage that that has done to this continent. So it was, it was about 6ish years ago that all this started coalescing into. Into poetry.

[Holly Gattery]

And why do you feel like a poem was. And a long poem at that was. Was the most fitting form for this exploration to take. This is a conversation I have a lot. Why poetry? Why not a collection of personal essays? Why. Why not fictionalize it into a story? And I want to preface this. I mean, you know, this. But for our listeners, poetry is my factory setting. So this, this isn't me asking Laurie to justify the exit. Why poetry is important. It's just that with all these other ways to explore this. Why poetry?

[Laurie D. Graham]

Yes. Yeah, exactly. I had the same question as I was writing this. And I think it was in the gaps of my aunt's telling and the gaps in our family's own knowledge about the exact circumstances of our arrival here, why my families picked up from Eastern and Western Europe and came to this country, what circumstances led them to make that move? Not knowing this stuff and not having that information as kind of the. The core family treasure that. That has been maintained and passed down was the. Was Ripe for poetry. For me to be able to get to those gaps or to say something about those gaps most meaningfully, I had to use the poetic form. And the lines in. In the poems in this book are very, very slight. They. They don't. It takes a lot for them to extend past a couple inches in width. I'm very rarely reaching it to the right. Reaching to the right margin of the book. So the. The visual placement of these poems is kind of echoing those gaps. And. And that felt to me like the right move. There's another book I know that that or I feel responsibility to write, which is sort of a family history book that I give to the members of my family. And that one is the hard one for me. That's the one that I feel is so precarious. There's so many facts to have pinned down. And what do those facts mean? Like, what did they yield? And. And if I screw up, then that screw up is on the books forever. And just the. The rote prose telling of those facts is, I find really, really difficult to do and might take me a very, very long time. But the right in the gaps seemed to be the place where I wanted to start.

[Holly Gattery]

Yeah. And you think of the page of a book of poetry as a stage. And it's really interesting for me to look at the words on your page, the line placement, and see, as you said, how everything feels. Everything's telling the same. I don't want to say story, because your poem really defies narrative sense or enforcing a narrative sense onto history, onto family history. But if you think of the lines, and the grouping of lines is like people on a stage, and there's like, this distance between them while they can all see each other. And it was really fascinating for me to fit with how that made me feel, how it made me reflect on my own family history. And I felt like poetry was the best possible way to explore this. And I found it really interesting how you did it. But I do want to talk a little bit about what you just said about being a family storyteller, because that feels like such a tremendous responsibility to me. And even just in writing a memoir, which was my very first book, I mean, I. If I got like, a minute detail wrong, like, I thought somebody lived on one street, but it was the next street over. It was like my family was like, well, nothing she said is true, because this one detail. Exactly is it true? It's like, oh, it's the same freaking neighborhood in Toronto. I don't know what you want me to Say nothing has fundamentally changed. But, you know, it really impressed upon me how much this matters, even if nobody outside of the family reads it, especially if no one outside the family reads it. These stories are so vital. And I was wondering if you could speak to the responsibility you felt to. When I say get this right in this book and calling it back to me, not. Not the family history book you're. You're thinking of working on. But in the long poem, I feel like poetry has the ability to hold multiple truths at once without, like. Without feeling the need to impose narrative sense or a pat conclusion. So when I. When I say the responsibility you felt to get this right. I'm not taught right and truth are not synonymous in that question. But I'd love to hear you speak to maybe how you approached it or considerations you kept in mind while writing this.

[Laurie D. Graham]

Yeah, yeah, that was that kind of. I really like how you describe that about how poetry allows multiple truths to exist side by side and not resolve necessarily. And that's something that was kind of the main goal of this book, was to have it be that I'm. I'm detailing the harms that homesteading has done on this continent from displacement of indigenous peoples from their territory to the present day of industrial agriculture, which is doing a sort of rehabbing of the land to an extent that. That it's just set up to be a receiver of. Of seed and a thing so that alongside just wanting to have my great grandmother's names on the page, to have their stories on the page as a sort of reclamation of their existence, that doesn't necessarily make the official record in full to thinking about my own childlessness. And the. After all the. The research I've done into the generations that come before me, to think about how with me there's. There's going to be a stoppage in that continuance to have all these things live together. That was the thing I wanted to get the most right. And I try to acknowledge in this book how what is known is always slippery and always changing that part where, where we can be so sure of like, what. What the facts are or what the. What the dominant story is. There's always another telling that exists somewhere else. So try to. I was trying to have the telling to show that telling as. As somewhat of a precarious thing or somewhat of a changeable thing. And the thing I wanted to make it so that all the different threads that I wanted to make sure I include, that's kind of maybe how I exist in these stories is having These different desires for like, what the meaning of this existence could be. It was that those threads I wanted to make sure were stitched right or braided correctly. And I don't know, I. I don't know if I got it right. It's sort of a. It's sort of a matter of I got it right in this moment. And I'm actually really curious already to, to know what I'm going to think of this book in say, 10 years, 20 years or something. Just to, to know if, if there's something enduring in what I've written or if it's in fact that this is a changeable story that I'm telling too.

[Holly Gattery]

I love that answer. I often think of my autobiographical work as a time capsule of who I was at the time and my patience. And I look back on anything autobiographical I've written and I'm like, I don't think I would have written that again or I wouldn't have written that way. But I don't necessarily. I never regret what I wrote. It's just I wouldn't approach it the same way. Which, which is fine. That's fine. You can step in the same river twice and so.

[Laurie D. Graham]

Exactly. Yeah, I think of that with my, my book Settler Education, which came out in 2016. If I were to tackle that book and that subject matter right now, I would write a completely different book. And I think I feel that way about all of my books so far. Is that. Yeah, I, I very much agree with you that it's the, the book existed as it had to exist in that time.

[Holly Gattery]

And just because I do know a little bit about settler education, I would just love for you to tell our listeners just a scooch about it.

[Laurie D. Graham]

Sure.

[Holly Gattery]

Yeah.

[Laurie D. Graham]

Settler Education came out in 2016 and it's a book about. It involved my learning about and digging into the story of the so called Frog Lake massacre, which is something that happened in 1885, end of 1884, in East Central, what is now East Central Alberta. A case where Big Bear, the Cree chief, his band of people were in a place in what's now Alberta with a settler community that was being really, really cruel to them, withholding food. And Big Bear was one of the last people to assert sovereignty. He was trying to.

[Holly Gattery]

He.

[Laurie D. Graham]

He was seeing the decline of the buffalo and kind of decline of, of society as his people knew it and was trying to have some hand in, in self determination for his people. The. They were being massively oppressed and mistreated by the settler people that were in the same area that they were in. And there was a point at which Big Bear's warriors shot a bunch of settlers. I think, if I'm remembering right, about eight or nine people were killed. And this kind of spurred the. Together with Louis Riel and his last push for Metis sovereignty. This was kind of the. These were the events that made the Northwest Resistance as we know it today used to be called the Northwest Rebellion or the real Rebellion. So it was me just kind of tracking all of this and trying to get the true story about these events, because that was a very hard thing to find in a lot of history books, as well as knowing that this was stuff that happened on land not very far from where my family settled in Alberta and in Saskatchewan. And yet I knew nothing about it, and neither did my grandparents and neither did my mother. So just coming to grips with that erasure of this kind of really, really important moment and this really tragic moment in that part of the continent and its history. But also, yeah, just trying to tie that to my existence in the present in Ontario and see, like, just drawing all these threads. So it was a book that I wrote. I finished it in 2015, and then the TRC report came out, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report came out, and then the book came out in 2016. So it came out at a time when people were really thinking about these things as well. So it had its moment. It was in its moment for sure.

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[Holly Gattery]

Let's go. And I think the continued exploration in your work of dominant narratives is really one that is fascinating on a personal level to me. I'm just going to quote you to you from Call back to me. No doubt she'd not be happy with my saying so here or with my godlessness or even wanting to know the sum of what's been lost from not talking and to what extent. That was her goal. And you're speaking about one of her grandmothers here, our great grandmother. I'm sorry I messed that up. But yeah, but grandmother's nodded. It's one back collie. Think about that for a second. But yeah, I was, I. I really have come back to that line over and over again and I haven't even have it jotted down in notebooks. And I made, I've made a little graphic for myself that I have on my phone. And the reason I think about that line constantly is I'm invariably interested in how silence works and whether we have to honor people's silences about family histories that affect us all. And I don't, I don't think there's a right answer. I think everything depends on so many other factors. But I think interrogating ourselves about when we comply with silence is really important. And I just love to hear your thoughts about it because essentially at least one of your great grandmothers, you're not sure whether she would. Would have been happy with you digging around.

[Laurie D. Graham]

Yes, exactly. Yeah. That gr. That great grandmother. I keep a picture of her in this book because I think it's because I suspect she wanted to make sure that the stories were not told, that the things that were private would remain private. And I am totally, I am totally outing her in a way that I bet you she wouldn't appreciate. She so on my mother's side, I'm Ukrainian. On my mother's side and among the Ukrainian relatives of the, of my great grandparents generation, it was pretty common for their children, so this would be my grandparents generation, to ask their parents questions about where they came from. All these Ukrainian children fairly fresh on the scene and having, having only been their families, only been on that land for like, you know, not very many years, asking questions about what's the name of the town we come from? What relatives did you leave? What was it like in the old country? You know, these kind of typical shows of curiosity as to who am I and where do I come from? And the answer would be, why do you want to know? That's past. Like, don't, don't worry about it. You just go, do, do your chores, go to school, be good, don't worry about all that. It's over now. We're here now. And the vacuum that was created by that was profound. And at numerous points in my growing up, family members would try to fill it. Like, what. What. What are they hiding? Could it be that they had to flee? Could it be that. That there's. There were political reasons why they. They left? Or are they keeping. Keeping violent history unexpressed? Or is it that they just had. They were living in a profound sort of poverty and. And just couldn't find words to express how hard life was then. Like, there's all these. There's been all these moments of reaching toward an answer on the part of the. This. That kind of just has reverberated through the generations and it continues to this day. And I was feeling the need instead to show a little bit of. Of the people who were doing that or not doing that, expressing,

[Holly Gattery]

just

[Laurie D. Graham]

trying to leave the mystery be in a way, but then also failing numerous times on the page and just kind of getting the details, just trying to amass the details and get them on the page. So that was an ongoing kind of push pull. And I don't think I've resolved it at all. I know that I. It's important that. That my, you know, the. The things that aren't said be said. And especially when it comes to women's lives, like, that's. That's one place where I feel in some ways a responsibility to. To saying what. What hasn't necessarily been said so. So readily. But I know that. That it wouldn't be exactly welcome by that generation to have me doing that kind of talking. Or maybe not. I mean, maybe. I don't know that maybe they would be happy to hear me speaking these words. I don't know.

[Holly Gattery]

I just think it's so incredible that the way that silence works and the way that silence moves, which I think feel like people are so drawn to, and it's like this impulsive need to storytell that even when people are silent, that just means people are gonna make up their own stories. And you're, you know, you're silent, but you may not like the stories people make up even more than you than you want your silence. So, yeah, I. No matter what this impulse to tell stories, to fill in gaps, to make sense, I mean, you can either be part of shaping that narrative or you can be silent and then you can't complain about the narratives that are shaped.

[Laurie D. Graham]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And the other part of it too is that it could just be pain. It could just Be that, you know, the what, what needed to be said was, was the expression of some really traumatic stuff. Like it could be that as well that it's, it's kind of a self preservation or protection. And like, I don't know if the role then becomes, if that's the case, the role of the other family becomes to kind of surround that person, allow the saying to happen, or to get to a place where that, that is open and shared is. Feels to me like one goal, one, One way to proceed.

[Holly Gattery]

I often think about the difference and the important distinction between maintaining essential privacy, which I feel deeply is important, and then sanitizing my experience for the world, which I'm not interested in doing. I, not famously, but very loudly, once said on a podcast that I don't believe in people's sanctity, other people's sanctity. But what I mean is I don't believe in sparing them from me and my stories. I don't feel like that. That's what I mean. But I fully, I fully endorse people's privacy of their own lives. But as when we're talking about family and shared histories and shared stories and shared experiences, I think that's get sticky. And, and, and that's like where that line between someone's personal privacy and how. What they're being private about and how that privacy stymies eat, you know, your understanding of yourself or your understanding your family history. I mean that's where it gets sticky. And you're. I think your book does such a excellent job of talking about it, exploring it, but again, not giving any resolution necessarily.

[Laurie D. Graham]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And especially this, the, the act of saying what has not been said. This, the subject of this book is around, you know, the founding theft of the theft that founds this country, the theft of land and how that is in fact why I exist here. And then I don't have much in the way of why my families came here and engaged in that theft. So there are some larger urgencies around knowing, around pushing past that silence that, that definitely propel this book too.

[Holly Gattery]

I, I often think about that as well. And something for me again to reflect on is like these wonderful memories I have of growing up by a lake in Ontario that it turns out my, my family, my extended family owned most of the lake. And how is that even possible? You know, like, think, think. We've been here six, like on one side of my family, I'm. My dad's an immigrant from Iran, but I'm on the other side of the Family, the Scottish side. Like, how. How. How did these people own all this land? And, you know, thinking about that, and it's something I only really began thinking about probably in the, like, 2010s, like, when. When we were kind of. I hope more of us were collectively waking up from this, you know, kind of this apathy that. Not even apathy. I mean, I wasn't apathetic. I just didn't know. And how do I not know? And how have I not been more curious about this before? And. And dealing with that as a settler without, like, dealing with these issues and dealing with this discomfort without looking for anybody to make us feel better about it.

[Laurie D. Graham]

You've basically summed up my. My poetry in a nutshell. Everything that I write about.

[Holly Gattery]

Yeah. It's not on anyone else to make us feel guilty. It's. And, you know, you know, on one side, I have this, you know, long generation of living here as my. And one family, white settlers, but also as a. As another side, as recent immigrant. And it's like, you know, there's lots to think about. And I think that's what I really enjoyed about settler education, which I've also read, and I've read Fast Commute, too, but. But. And this book, is that it? It's not saying I'm going to make you uncomfortable. You're interrogating something personal or interrogating a collective history, and I'm just made uncomfortable and unsettled as I should be. And I'm constantly saying another refrain by me in addition to, I like it when poets write novels, and I don't respect your sanctity. But another thing I constantly say is, I don't understand why people don't like to be unsettled. It's such a good thing for us to be unsettled. And I enjoy that about your book. So what I'm thinking right now is it'd be really cool to hear you read from the book so our listeners can get a taste of it.

[Laurie D. Graham]

Certainly. I will read a few pages from the title poem, Calling It Back to Me. This book contains four long poem sequences, and this is the first one in the book. This is from Calling It Back to Me, Me. The tracking of family lines across continents has taught me three things. That this act in part, is meant to assert the relentless pairing blue to pink, blue to pink, that I know now. Something of her fear telling us about the woman she loved, and that my years of fruitless bleeding have been definitive. The end of fertile months is a mourning process, the conscious end of A maternal line, also a mourning process. The hidden names removed by marriage in the air and never explained. I can feel them all in my gait, the in breath, the out breath at the top of the rise. The clouds, water on the cusp of freezing, falling thick over the ground. The women who look like each other, one older, one younger, walking down sidewalks together. I miss the lives I have not lived. I don't know how I threw myself clear. The forgotten selves refuse the tragic ending. Memory, after all, is something you do together. Loot bequeathed six rings in a sandwich bag I draw this story from a languageless place, begin again the process of becoming something else While the home places travel to meet me each morning hazy again what disappeared by their hands, what disappears by mine. The sum of a life when you live it this far off the years spooling out like the border guard with his pencil. I'm at my desk altering it. Oxen, walking plough, flail, hand sieve where they toiled, dug, multiplied, all I deem important. Important. They wanted me to forget and we forget more than that. We surpass those who landed us here. We don't know what year they were born or where or how to spell their names. The railway arrives, the town is flourishing. The railway leaves, the town dies. I've heard the tenor of reasons, not the reasons themselves. So I start at the bottom that the edge time hasn't shown with the past ascending in the shape of a tornado higher than the scale goes all aberration, a thrill, a breath of oxygen contained in the stories but seldom in the tree. The countless children multiply the sense of who you are until all sense disappears and the legions who didn't become adults, their small singular dots. Where does relation end? Why would I want it to? Why would it tax this way? The village names rise in the mouth, what came on the ships, the way a meal is blessed clothing sewn and washed, the red wooden beads in my suitcase. The book of superstitions, the lesson unspoken, origin unknown, which I carry in the largest muscles. If you see someone coming, you run.

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[Holly Gattery]

I love that. That's such a nice little. The, the way that your lines are economical. I mean, I'll all, not all good poetry. Some poetry is more economical than others. So I'm trying not to paint with a broad brush here. There are prose poems, of course, and, but they're still more economical than prose. But I, I think I want to, I really want to draw attention to just how distilled your work is. And I'd love for you to talk about that process of distillation. Whether this is something that is coming more naturally to you, if this is something that's always come more naturally to you. I mean, to an extent, I mean, I'm sure what we wrote, or at least what I wrote in my teens, does not, thank God, closely resemble to what I'm writing now. But I think that the process of distillation is something that, as I mentor poets, is something I'm constantly getting, getting them to work on. Like, not everything needs to be as distilled as other things. But distillation is important. And so again, I just really love to hear you talk about distilling for this collection.

[Laurie D. Graham]

Right. Yes. I, that was kind of key to this book is that distillation. And it's not always how I write. It was kind of the, the form or the, the style I needed for this book. It, it was the way that I could say the things and say them part way or say them in pieces or say like, you know, just kind of getting, getting to the, to a few cruxes of things. But the, these poems started rather formless. They started in fact, I guess technically as prose poems I was. I. I started as I do most, with most things. I was writing notes and just kind of not really worrying about the shape just yet, just finding words and. And putting them on the page. And I. I was writing in a notebook, so I was doing it by hand and realizing that there was too much there. The more that was there, the more I felt this assumption on the page that I knew what I was doing or that I knew what I was talking about or that the story can some somehow reach a completion. And so the. The lines started. I started forming lines out of these paragraphs, and the lines started getting really, really short. And I would just kind of have two or three. Two or three words on a line, and then I'd want to interrupt that line, go on to the next one. There's lots of enjambment, so I'm not. Not ending on a natural pause at the end of the line. I'm kind of letting the. The thoughts get a little broken by the line breaks. And the process of cutting became really crucial in the revision stage of this book. To understand when. And this kind of speaks to what we were talking about before, but to understand when I am feeling compelled to explain or compelled to fill in or to. To reason through something, that's when that started. That's when I. I knew that. That I was perhaps going down the wrong path with this book. And. And it was. It was quite a. It took quite a while to get the form. But once I had that form, those small, small lines and that distillation, then things came fast. I was. There was a stretch of time when I was writing pages and pages a day of this book. So once I hit on that, I was there. It was basically. Basically home with this book and the poems that I've written since. Poems I've written before and poems I've written since are not taking this form either. I'm unfurling line a little bit longer on the page again.

[Holly Gattery]

I like that about it, though, having read your previous work. First of all, I think that you always carry a quality of distillation. Just the play and the way it's playing out is different. But isn't that. I mean, isn't that lovely? Like, I remember reading Kyle Flemmer's Super Giants and, you know, seeing the way that he. Like the lunar flag poems, which are poems shaped like lunar flags with, like holes in the middle. And like I said, I love the fact that poetry just is like a giant sandbox you get to play. And it's not like prose which has a certain formula even. Even literary prose has. There are certain expectations. I mean, I think poetry is this form that just kind of face melts. Like, there's. There's. You can just explode expectations. And I think as. As a practitioner of it, it's like whenever I'm bored, if I don't know what to do, it's poetry. Because poetry is not going to stop me. And poets are not gonna stop me. There's no guardrails, which is terrifying and exciting and fun, and I love that about it. But I think. I think you're always. You always have that quality of distillation, which is something I admire. And one thing that. When I was done reading your work, this particular book, what I took away from is, for me, I can always tell. I love something when it makes me want to write. And I thought, oh, I want short line. I haven't done. Why haven't I done short lines before? And it's. It's nuts to me that I haven't. And when I. When I automatically, I'm like, oh, I like how they're playing. I want to play that way. It's a really lovely feeling. Which is why I always get baffled when people are like, oh, I don't like poetry. It's too hard. Or it has this stodgy reputation. I thought, what are you reading? It's the opposite. Is the most fun.

[Laurie D. Graham]

Yes. Yeah. So my. At the back of this book, I thank a bunch of relatives who. Who kind of shared the stories of my families. A certain number of people in that list of names are they, like, can't they. They profess that they can't really understand what I've written, or they don't really know how to read poetry. And I. I'm trying to. Trying to think that one through a little bit. For people who feel like, yeah, poetry, I don't get it. And I think it's because so often poetry is taught as, like, a riddle. Like, you're supposed to pour over it and solve for X. What does this thing mean? Give me the definitive answer. Whereas I want to really assert a reading of poetry that doesn't require you to always know what's going on and to be okay with, like, I'm not quite where I think I need to be, or I've stopped paying attention. And then I'm struck by this description of a flower that just came up. Just to, like, be able to exist in the book without feeling expectations is my wish and my, like, informal crusade as a poet. Like, we gotta change how people read this stuff, I think.

[Holly Gattery]

Yeah, I agree. I, I, One of the things I constantly say is, well, God, there's a thing, a lot of things I constantly say, apparently. But I, I have children. I have four of them. I'm constantly repeating myself anyway, but it's, it's that I don't like asking what a poem means. I like asking how it makes people feel. And like, of course, I would argue that not anything goes. I could not argue that your book is an exploration of the life cycle of a hippopotamus.

[Laurie D. Graham]

Yes.

[Holly Gattery]

Like, it is not. That is an incorrect interpretation. But I, I would say that, mind you, there's probably something in there that we could interpret.

[Laurie D. Graham]

Someone could probably spin that

[Holly Gattery]

I might be wrong, but on the whole, we could shouldn't say that. And I think that if we just like how, like, the line that I shared just makes me feel. And if it's like, oh, I feel that that makes. Oh, this poem makes me feel weird. Oh, that's good. That's probably what the poem was trying to do. Makes me feel happy. Yes. It makes me feel sad. Yes. It makes me feel hopeful or nostalgic. Yes, yes.

[Laurie D. Graham]

Like, and I've had a lot of people come up to me after reading from this book saying that, that my reading about my family has brought to mind stories about their family and that that to me is like a, is such a great thing to have this just evoke for others just the, the thinking of, of their own lives here and their own people. Like, I, I think that's so marvelous. And it doesn't have to, doesn't have to be that you're, you're in this book and, and conforming to its rubric. It's like, this is, I'm doing this so that, so that we can kind of maybe share, I can share with the reader in this process of, of examination. For sure.

[Holly Gattery]

Poetry is far less prescriptive than prose, that's for sure. If you just kind of do your, not do your own thing, but, you know, drop in and out of it, I, Yeah.

[Laurie D. Graham]

Let it wash over you. Don't worry too much what you're getting here.

[Holly Gattery]

Yeah, I think, I think in this, like, capitalistic age of productivity, I, I think people are more baffled by poetry's purpose than anything else. Like, no, I don't need you to do anything with this. No, don't have to read the entire thing in one night. No, it's okay. You read a page and put it down for a week. That's, it's so undemanding. It is like the perfect relationship in my opinion. It's there when you need it, but not when you don't. It's, and I mean, I'd argue I need it all the time, but still, it's, it's really just a lovely, I mean, this is a lovely reminder. And so I really do hope listeners not only pick up this book, but, you know, increase your intake of poetry in general.

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[Holly Gattery]

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[Laurie D. Graham]

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[Holly Gattery]

Plan your Scottish escape [e-mail] visitscotland so my final question for you Laurie. Well actually too, because I was gonna say what are you working on now? But you are the publisher of Brick and I love Brick. So I would love to give you an opportunity just to speak briefly on Brick and then what you are working on now. Non Brick related certainly yes.

[Laurie D. Graham]

Brick magazine is a literary journal. Next year it's going to celebrate 50 years of publication and it is stalwart in Toronto. It's been publishing proudly in Toronto for a very long time and it really loves the non fiction form. Not many people know that about that journal, but we are quite enamored of literary nonfiction and all the things that that can be. We're kind of pushing at the edges of that form all the time and we're also an international journal published in Canada. So we like to mingle voices in Canada with voices from around the world. We like to mingle emerging and established. We have published some massive, massive names alongside people for whom this is their first publication. And for many, many years, Michael Ondaatje was one of the editors of Brick, so he was kind of its driving force for a long time. He would invite, this was, you know, when he was doing a lot of touring for his novels. He would invite people to submit and we would get some pretty astounding submissions from some pretty astounding writers. So, yeah, yeah, that's, that's the magazine in a nutshell. Our summer issue is. We're, we're talking at the beginning of June. Our summer issue is, is nearly out. We're going to launch it on Monday at Flying Books. We have, we keep a little office in the back room of Flying Books, a bookstore in Toronto. And it's. Yeah, it's been really, really fun to make this magazine. We have a very intensive editorial process. We think deeply about the written word and the act of reading and making that pleasing for people. How is the magazine shaped? What kind of paper do we use? How beautiful is the type? Like these, these are the sorts of things that I get to spend my time thinking about, which is pretty great. And we're thinking of, we're plotting our 50th anniversary celebrations right now too, which is going to be pretty wonderful as well. For my own work, I have, I'm blasting off in a few different directions at the moment. I have written a book of prose, non fiction y poetic y type prose that has similar concerns as Calling It Back to Me. This is kind of almost the companion book to Calling It Back to Me. I was writing it alongside these poems and it's, it's kind of the, the opposite or like, I don't know, the opposite. Form wise. It's kind of, it's going long on the page where, where these poems are very, very slight. I've got, I'm sitting on fiction that I should almost not say anything about because it's in that weird, precarious, nascent stage and who knows what's going to happen. This is me like trudging into, into territory I haven't trudged in, in very, very long. So I'm like just kind of feeling my way through that. And inevitably there' new poems, different shape to them entirely. I don't know what the heck I'm doing, but I'm just kind of trying to amass words, just trying to get things down on the page. So I'm very unfocused, just kind of working on all sorts of things at once and, and seeing what coalesces.

[Holly Gattery]

I love being unfocused it's such a throwback to be like, oh, there's a bee there. There's a bit of foam in the wave. There's a pine, a weird cheap pine cone.

[Laurie D. Graham]

Feeling the need to just go flitting off wherever I need to flit off and not think too much about it. Yeah. Yeah. There's something so nice about that.

[Holly Gattery]

It is. Okay, Well, I mean, thank you. I love that. And I can't wait to read whatever you put out next and have you back on the show. So, Laurie, thank you for joining me today on NBN to talk about your really marvelous book, calling it that to Me, which Everyone again, was published by McClellan Stewart, and you can pick it up wherever books are bought or borrowed. Thank you so much, Lauren.

[Laurie D. Graham]

Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network.

[Holly Gattery]

We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us

[Laurie D. Graham]

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[Holly Gattery]

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[Laurie D. Graham]

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[Holly Gattery]

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